John's absolutely right and the massive advantage is that it's given us a clean slate when it comes to interface design to make sure that everything behaves as you would expect normal Windows applications to.
It's taken us 2 1/2 years to hone the application down to achieve this and in that time we would have had to have coped with 3 Sage version changes and required our customers to also continue to keep pace with Sage's annual upgrades!
A major objective has been to make PMPro's forms as user friendly as possible and of course that also means having database structures that are more versatile and agile than Sage's, and free from some of Sage's basic technical and design glitches. That has meant freeing ourselves from the quite idiosyncratic 'Sage Culture' that really does wind a lot of people up.
I know because for several years I taught Sage and too often had to calmly talk students down from rafters! In contrast, when we first introduced some retail staff to PMPro's EPOS they were confidently using it within 15 minutes. That's what 'clean slate, used-based design' is about.
For instance a very annoying Sage feature is its large, undifferentiated and fragmented forms for managing products, customers and suppliers and its still quirky way of making you close forms before you can open other features, whereas we've concentrated on trying to emulate the way real, busy multitasking business people work with lots of balls in the air at the same time.
If we had stayed within Sage we would not have been able to do that, whick is a reflection on Sage, not on us.
Best to think of PMPro as a fully integrated extension of Sage, or Sage as a fully integrated extension of PMPro depending where you are coming from. But the degree of integration is entirely up to the user and we think user choice is paramount.
Our approach is also very mindful of SME start-up costs. With PMPro you will be able to start doing sophisticated pricing and product management work for just the price a PC and £200 inc-VAT and when you've made some money you can then invest a good chunk of it on Sage and import PMPro data into it at a click of a button, and it's then that you'll probably need to.
Nobody should ever be under the allusion that having an accounting package is more important than pricing your products intelligently, or that Sage will actually help you to do that strategic, DYNAMIC pricing.
There's nothing wrong with counting out your money at the end of each day on the kitchen table . . . but you'll only have enough money to make into nice little piles if your sourcing, costing, operations, marketing and pricing are right.
Accounting is fundamentally about history, pricing is about making it.
